Sunday, March 4, 2012

AVWW Beta 0.902 "The Kid Gloves Are Officially Off" Released!

This one, once again, is primarily focused on difficulty. To be more specific, the lack of spread of combat difficulties in the recent versions. This game has always been designed to cater to a diverse crowd in terms of skill level, but in recent version we had a lot of combat difficulties suited for low-skill players, and too few ones suited for high-skill players.

As such, the difficulties have been shifted around rather substantially, and so you might find that you are now playing on a difficulty level that is murderously too hard all of a sudden. Sorry about that, if you get caught in the crossfire in that way, but remember that you can always return to your settlement at any time and tweak the difficulty to be just what you want.

Really the only thing that has changed in regards to difficulty has been monster health -- on higher difficulties, monsters simply had too little of it. It's fine to one-shot monsters on a low difficulty, but on a higher difficulty there needs to be time for you and the monster to get some good shots off at each other. You need time to be forced to dodge or block, and to think about the various attacks as the monster launches them, and that doesn't happen if you zap the monster in one burst as soon as he's on the screen.

We've also made a large number of other tweaks and bugfixes in this version, and there's a fairly rare new kind of item that you can find in lava stash rooms: advanced heatsuits. Some of the mechanics of fighting in windstorms have also been changed up a bit, so that spells no longer get slowed when fired upwind, but get sped up even more when fired downwind. The effect can be pretty dramatic in terms of spiking the difficulty, but at the same time not making it impossible for certain spells to damage the other side when they are firing against the wind.

Lastly, if you found yourself getting insta-killed by monsters in the last few weeks while using storm dash, that was due to some calculation errors that have now been fixed. Along with some other fixes to stats modifiers in general, actually, and some buffs to using upgrade stones on stats other than health.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.